The invention pertains to surveillance, monitoring and real-time event processing. It has application in public health & bioterrorism, border and port security, public and community safety, and government data integration, to name a few.
Today, national, state, and local governments are challenged to achieve unprecedented levels of cooperation in and among agencies and organizations charged with protecting the safety of communities. Many of these organizations use either proprietary or incompatible technology infrastructures that need to be integrated in order to provide real-time, critical information for effective event monitoring and coordinated emergency response. Information must be shared instantaneously and among numerous entities to effectively identify and respond to a potential threat or emergency-related event.
Significant efforts are underway along these lines, for example, in the public health and bioterrorism arena. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has launched several initiatives toward forming nationwide networks of shared health-related information that, when fully implemented, will facilitate the rapid identification of, and response to, health and bioterrorism threats. The CDC plans the Health Alert Network (HAN), for example, to provide infrastructure supporting for distribution of health alerts, disease surveillance, and laboratory reporting. The Public Health Information Network (PHIN) is another CDC initiative that will provide detailed specifications for the acquisition, management, analysis and dissemination of health-related information, building upon the HAN and other CDC initiatives, such as the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS).
While these initiatives, and others like them in both health and non-health-related fields, define functional requirements and set standards for interoperability of the IT systems that hospitals, laboratories, government agencies and others will use in forming the nationwide networks, they do not solve the problem of finding data processing equipment capable of meeting those requirements and standards.
It is not uncommon for a single enterprise, such as a hospital, for example, to have several separate database systems to track medical records, patient biographical data, hospital bed utilization, vendors, and so forth. The same is true of the government agencies charged with monitoring local, state and national health. In each enterprise, different data processing systems might have been added at different times throughout the history of the enterprise and, therefore, represent differing generations of computer technology. Integration of these systems at the enterprise level is difficult enough; it would be impossible on any grander scale. This is a major impediment to surveillance, monitoring and real-time events processing in public health and bioterrorism. Similar issues result in parallel problems in border and port security, public and community safety, and government data integration, is the consolidation of data from disparate databases and other sources.
An object of this invention is to provide improved methods and apparatus surveillance, monitoring and real-time events processing.
A related object is to provide such methods and apparatus as can applied in public health and bioterrorism, e.g., to facilitate CDC initiatives in this area.
A further object of the invention is to provide such methods and apparatus as can be applied border and port security, public and community safety, and government data integration.
A still further object of the invention is to provide such methods and apparatus as can be implemented inexpensively, incrementally or otherwise without interruption of IT functions that they bring together.